Beverly Yuen Thompson - Digital Nomads Living on the Margins: Remote Laptop Entrepreneurs in the Gig Economy

I am writing during the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, which has significantly altered the context of the digital nomad lifestyle. Pandemics and environmental catastrophes will likely continue to have increasing impacts on both leisure travel and remote work in ways only currently speculated upon. Before the pandemic digital nomads or remote workers who use their freedom-from-location to travel the world were an odd minority. I envision them as canaries in the digital coalmine. They point to the vulnerabilities of future employment models for the next generations. Overnight as we entered the pandemic crisis, many white-collar workers were thrown into a digital workplace, as they were quarantined in their homes, along with family members, and children released from school. For the top tech workers, such as those at Google and Microsoft, they have the privilege of continuing their work from home for the indefinite future (C. Duffy, 2020). Of course, the top tech and start-up workers are best positioned for remote work. Twitter is allowing its staff to work from home forever (Baron, 2020). The pandemic brought to light the impact of decades of dismantling and underfunding social safety nets and health care, environmental racism, widespread inequalities, and high rates of poverty in the United States and beyond. As millions lose their employment in the United States, even more desperate workers will seek employment on digital freelance platforms, competing with the already struggling entry-level digital nomad workers. As more people work remotely, their ability to travel or move to new locations increases, potentially shifting urban density. Digital nomads often found their hometowns prohibitively expensive, and the ability to live abroad more cheaply was one motivating factor. Now that is true for even more people. Matthew Haag (2020) writes for the New York Times an article entitled, Manhattan Faces a Reckoning If Working From Home Becomes the Norm, in which he points out that finance firms and other high-expense Manhattan employers may not only allow workers to telecommute, but they may shutter their offices altogether and save billions in rent. Haag writes,

Before the coronavirus crisis, three of New York Citys largest commercial tenants Barclays, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley had tens of thousands of workers in towers across Manhattan. Now, as the city wrestles with when and how to reopen, executives at all three firms have decided that it is highly unlikely that all their workers will ever return to those buildings.